I have been studying the new SFL-based MRU plist files found in OS X 10.11. They make analysis hard because they are binary plist files using the NSKeyedArchiver format – see here for my manual analysis of these files. I’ve also included the ‘older’ format plist files used in OS X 10.10 and older.

In order to analyze them better (and student requests) I wrote a Python script to output the contents of these files in an easier to read format. Nothing fancy, just text printed to standard output.

The script is meant to be run on a directory; this can be a directory of extracted plist files from an image, a directory on your own system (ie: ~/Library), or from a mounted image (ie: /Volumes/mounted_image_file/Users/<username>/), you get the idea.

The script usage is below. The only required argument is the directory, but the output can include binary BLOB hex dump of the Bookmark data (--blob). Most of the Mac MRUs contain a binary Bookmark BLOB of data that can be useful to determine where a certain file was located or where an application was run from. I’ve included it as an option as it can get very, very verbose.

The script also has two dependencies, hexdump.py and ccl_bplist.py. These files can be installed or just simply placed in the same directory you are running the macMRU.py script from. (Installation on OS X 10.11 systems are limited thanks to SIP.)